JORIS BAUDOIN

Picturing museums

European museums of contemporary art are visited.These visits are described in the book Picturing museums.Every museum visit is followed by a new artworkAround 2022 the book and the exhibition will be presented.

The countries

In response to Muzee: 1/8 Moon

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1/8 Moon in response to Muzee Ostend2016reinforced concrete 1x 1 x1 m. scale 1: 1,737,000A class of schoolchildren stand with their teacher by a half meter thick lunar surface slice of a few square meters, magnified by the Frenchwoman Ingrid Luche. ‘Morceau de Lune’ is made of concrete, polystyrene and metal. There is no scale mentioned, and that suggests the need to depict the actual size. The children have to guess what it portrays and they succeed well because Ingrid Luche has included craters. Ingrid would truly believe that the moon's surface looks like this from so close (lunar craters vary in diameter from a few meters to more than 250 kilometers). On the flyer I received at the counter are more than fifty names in bold, including Paul van Hoeydonck, amongst others. There is work by this famous Belgian in Muzee of course, but not only here, also even on the moon. And now I walk back to Morceau de Lune by Ingrid Luche, and I must remember that there really is a statuette by van Hoeydonck. On the Internet, Paul Hoeydonck talks about the first artwork on the moon: ‘I heard my gallery owner in New York say: ‘Let's put a work by Paul on the moon’. I went straight in and said, ‘You are completely mad.’ In the end we contacted NASA. I ate with the astronauts of Apollo 15 and I told them that they were the knights of this time. When I suggested putting a statue on the moon, they said, ‘Well, let's talk about this with Nixon. Nixon simply asked: ‘Is it a Republican or a Democrat?’ They said, 'It's a Belgian. ‘ ‘Oh, okay,’ Nixon said. A year later I had a statue on the moon. ‘

I put this statuette on the part of the moon you see as the crescent setting in the sea. The statuette that is really only about eight cm high here would be 25 km high in scale, because this moon is 1 to 1.737 million in scale (one meter times the radius.)Photo2: Ingrid Luche, Piece of the moon, Muzee